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Is a Bad Jane Austen Adaptation a Victimless Crime?

Don’t get your bonnet strings in a knot if you’re disappointed by Sense and Sensibility. It was bound to happen

Between 1938 and now, Jane Austen’s 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice has been adapted for screen dozens of times—sparking faithful period adaptations, like the iconic 1995 BBC series, as well as looser adaptations, like Bridget Jones’s Diary and Hallmark’s Pride, Prejudice, and Mistletoe. Sense and Sensibility, another Austen classic, has made it to film or TV at least ten times. And Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel Jane Eyre has inspired well over twenty movies and series, including a whole slate of silent films from the 1910s. Something about these nineteenth-century novels has kept each new generation of filmmakers coming back. Perhaps they are uniquely timeless in some way; maybe they are simply in the public domain.

We’re entering something of an adaptation renaissance. The last time this happened was around 1995, a period known as “Austenmania,” when it seemed like all of Jane Austen’s novels were hitting the big screen at once. Now, thirty years later, following the commercial success of Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights—which raked in over $80 million (US) globally on its opening weekend—a slate of new nineteenth-century adaptations is set to be released.

At the end of this year, Keira Knightley will pass the baton to a new Lizzie Bennet, in a Netflix Pride and Prejudice adaptation. A currently under-production series will see Aimee Lou Wood portray Jane Eyre. And, on October 16, Daisy Edgar-Jones will star in an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. We can hope that these adaptations will be instantly beloved and heralded as modern classics. In reality, it’s quite possible that some of them will disappoint us.

In an essay for The New Yorker on Fennell’s remake of Wuthering Heights, which has been adapted over thirty times, film critic Richard Brody contends that novels are not harmed by sloppy adaptations because “even the worst filmmakers aren’t burning the books, just misunderstanding them.” In other words, a bad adaptation doesn’t alter the text of its source material. As long as the great novel that inspired the shoddy film can still be checked out at the library, then no harm no foul, right?

It depends on who you ask. The most popular review for the film on Letterboxd (an online platform for rating and discussing movies, frequented by annoying people such as myself) reads: “emily brontë died of tuberculosis 177 years ago yet this adaptation is still the worst thing that has ever happened to her.” Sure, hyperbole is the language of the internet, but over 100,000 people have liked this review, signalling some level of agreement with the idea that a bad adaptation isn’t just disappointing or aesthetically displeasing but actually offensive.

The other school of thought, of course, is that “Wuthering Heights is SO good when you don’t have an English major in your ear telling you it’s nothing like the book.” That’s a post on X with almost 10,000 likes and over 5 million views. And while Brody doesn’t seem to agree that the film is “SO good,” he does put forward his own version of this sentiment. “Rushing to defend a literary source against a supposed cinematic mauling,” he says, “is often little more than an attempt to signal culturedness and education.” Books don’t need protecting, Brody suggests. Only our fragile egos do.

Is that true? Is a bad adaptation a victimless crime? I can tell you that there was at least one victim of Fennell’s adaptation: me. I saw the film in theatres with friends when it came out. I’ve been a fan of the Brontë sisters since before I outgrew young adult novels, but I figured that, even if Fennell’s movie presented a shallower version of the story, it would at least be fun. Reader, it was not.

But those are the stakes of making any movie: you might bore people, or irritate people, or offend people. But you’re not usually accused of making “the worst thing that has ever happened” to........

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